


Before the Fall

by writerindark



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 06:18:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11330232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writerindark/pseuds/writerindark
Summary: Katniss getting ready for President Snow’s execution. It’s always bothered me how she’s all decked out in full femme fatale gear in this scene, the most pivotal of the entire series- but she looks nothing like herself. Perhaps it’s to show how she’s forever changed from the events of the novels, so far removed from her past self, but I would have liked for it to have come full circle, looking the world in the face with the same vulnerability that years of devastation had tried to destroy. I also took some agency to fictionalize exactly when Katniss chose to shoot Coin instead of Snow. Anyways, enjoy!





	Before the Fall

My eyes meet their reflection in the mirror. I don’t recognize much else besides them- steely and grey as ever.

I sit in a makeup chair, surrounded by harsh lights. My team has transformed me into a dark, flightless bird of a thing for Snow’s execution, a black-clad bearer of death. My face is overly contoured, my eyes coated in liner and shadowed like a mask.

Soon I will march before the nation in this costume, a single arrow in my quiver meant for the heart whose owner is responsible for all my suffering, and the games that started it all.

Just two years ago, this woman staring back at me was merely a girl, fighting for her and her family’s life every day in the wasteland that was her home. She wore no makeup or intricate hairstyles. Her face was as bare and dewey as the woods she foraged and the secluded river in which her father taught her to swim. No one knew her name.

My mind goes blank for a second, wrapped up in who I used to be. How I’ll never get back to her. Not after everything.  
But I can’t let him take every last thing from me, from the shell of myself left behind by his treachery. I know that girl, and she’s within me somewhere. And I won’t let him- or anyone- forget that.

I impulsively grab a spare cloth from the vanity and wipe it across my face, removing cakey layers of powder and color that took hours to painstakingly apply. Reporters will likely gawk at my bare face, but I don’t care. I am not here for them.

Effie approaches, all decked out in obnoxious yellow, and gasps when she sees what I’m doing, She tries to grab the cloth from my hand, but my grip is iron tight.

“Have you gone mad?” she demands. “Your beautiful makeup.. Oh, the look is simply ruined!”

I offer no excuse, just continue swiftly with my work. She huffs and hurries away, surely off to alert the team of my lunacy.

My face begins to slowly emerge: hollow cheeks, tired eyes, faint freckles across the bridge of my nose. My hair is still stiff from exorbitant amounts of product, but I manage to tame it into a plait that swings along my shoulders, just how it did trekking through the forest on an early spring afternoon, bow in hand, all that time ago.

My clothes are structured yet simple: black shirt and pants with a plate of faux armor. Manufactured boots that pinch my toes. Beetee’s military bow.  
Perhaps I look silly in this getup with nothing on my face, as if I had paired my Reaping dress with one of those ridiculous Capitol hairstyles.

This is what I give myself: the image of this lost girl. It can never be the same, but my lips still retain their shape, my skin maintains a glow from beneath, and the ice behind my eyes, the same as my father’s, will stay, always.

\--

I vaguely register the protestations of my team as I rise from the chair and march towards the entrance, eyes locked straight ahead. I feel the single, deadly arrow burning through its holster on my back as I stomp out to the beat of drums and cheers. They are all here for me, to live out their dreams of vengeance by the flight of my arrow as it sinks into the chest of a ruthless leader, helplessly tied to a post, a ceremonial end to generations of tyranny.

The last thing he’ll see, as the world holds its collective breath waiting for my release, will be my face- untouched, unforgiving, unchanged.

I will look to him like that girl once did, before she was ruined. Before he ruined her. But she lives in me somewhere, a ghost in my chest that can never truly be destroyed, a dauntless spirit.

The crowd is deafening as I make my way across the square, the same one I tread upon in ornate carriages, ages ago. Their cheers were for something much different then. I am a one-woman procession. In a few minutes my vengeance will fly mercilessly toward my enemy. The one who took away the one I held dearest.

I shift my gaze upwards to Coin, standing triumphantly on a balcony. So cold and grey. I imagine a kiss of red blooming across her sterile coat. I think back to what Snow told me in the rose garden.

A breeze brushes my cheeks. Sitting with Gale atop a hill in the woods, our spot. Rising from the platform and peering out onto that first Cornucopia. Running through the ruins of District 2.

Gusts from the blast that killed my sister.

I know now what I must do. The world will be watching- and what about afterwards? I suddenly remember the nightlock pill fastened in a pocket on my shoulder. My saving grace.

At least I’ll go out in my own way, looking like myself. Like how Prim remembered me. That bare-faced girl with better things to worry about than makeovers, or frills, or rebellion. Who would lay down her life for her little sister, her little duck.

This is my last stand. My name is Katniss Everdeen. District 12 is my home. President Coin killed my sister. I have nothing more to live for, but this. When the cameras zoom in on my face as I draw back my bowstring, they will capture the girl I once was, who I long for, whose final act will go down forever in history: scrappy, modest, dutiful, natural.

She has nothing to hide.


End file.
